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Why Love Generative Art(2018) by Jason Bailey toggleRes(1)}>

1. Generative art is, especially at the early stage, related (and somehow limited) to visual elements like geometry shapes and patterns. However, what is the possibility outside? sound? smell? something we can touch? or, more abstractly, experiment?
2. Coming back to generative visuals, trying to create textures/feelings that are surprisingly close to the natural/analog/organic things seems to be the goal of most (if not all) generative artists (now and in history). I am not saying this is not good, artists like Jared Tarbell and Mark J Stock made amazing works with this approach. It just feels like the early time of photography, when all the photographers trying to make photos look like paintings. So if you are using an algorithm to generate a painting, why not paint one yourself?
3. To be honest, I am not a fan of AI and machine learning. And I probably will disagree with the argument the author made in the article that "As with all generative art, AI art is largely driven by human guidance". For me (and maybe I am terribly wrong), AI is more like a lazy way to make art: you write a piece of code to find rules in thousands of images (or whatever kind of data) and that piece of code makes something out of them. It is just so easy for an artist to lose their thoughts in the process and at the end "look! this beautiful/interesting image is generated by an AI" is the only thing left in the artwork.
Code Goes In, Art Comes Out (2019) by Tyler Hobbes toggleRes(2)}>

1. "Good arts are unpredicted yet understandable." This is a very good point. But what "understandable" means is a question we as artists need to think about. Are abstract paintings (like Mondrian's grids and Marks Rothko's Orange And Yellow) "understandable"? Is a combination of random points "understandable"? The answers might be different for everyone. My understanding is, "understandable" means the artwork invokes something in the audience's minds. It might be a thought, an emotion, a piece of memory, or a person.
2. Emergence & chaos systems. It just reminds me that chaos systems (or chaos systems beside multiple pendulums) are not used by the generative artists a lot (at least compared to other concepts from math and physics). Maybe we should spend some time look into it and try to discover something innovative.
3. WHY make art with code? I love this question. "It is fun & it gives immediate feedback." I will say that they are good reasons to start trying but not enough for us to devote to an art project using code. We need arguments for why code/programming is the only best tool for the idea and why not other media. And sometimes if we think about that first when starting a project, we might find a better alternative.
4. "The universe itself is generative." And maybe we are living in a huge simulation. (BTW The Matrix 4 is coming in the winter. I am so excited.)
Vehicles(1986) by Valentino Braitenberg toggleRes(3)}>

1. It is quite amazing that this idea of little vehicles, (or today in generative art field so call agents) were created by the author as tools/members in a thought experiment for psychology. I think that opens a gate, and gives us a new perspective towards generative art. The theories behind it are not only about graphics or sounds, but also closely related to the studies of how animals, including us, behave in a complex environment. Thus, there is a bridge that has already been there between generative systems and social science. Now how can we use it to create generative artworks that engage with the people/communities/societies?
2. "It is ALIVE." This is a sentence from the book that the author uses to describe the first (and simplest) vehicle, and "ALIVE" is capitalized in the original text. It is quite interesting to think about this. The first vehicle is so simple that we can describe it in 2 sentences: 1. It moves faster in warmer places (or you can say that it hates hot weather). This is not a very "alively" characteristic since it is also the case for Brownian Motion. 2. It has a (general) direction. This is not very "alive", too. Think about a rock rolling down from a hill, it also has a general direction. But why the combination of these two not "alive" features makes the vehicle "ALIVE"? This is a very philosophical question, but I think also relevant to generative art. Since being "organic" is important while creating a generative image, we must at least know what is living matter and what does it mean to be "alive". (Somehow one may come to a simple conclusion that "organic" means not in perfect geometrical shapes, but think about the hive and Paleodictyon.)
3. From vehicle 3a to vehicle 3c. To be very simple, vehicle 3c is the combination of all vehicles before. Or we might say we get vehicle 3c by laying all the vehicles before on top of each other. This idea of "layers" creates very complicated behaviors for vehicle 3c. It is also a good strategy to use in generative (or every kind of) artworks.
4. related artworks: a)Lots of vehicles b) I forgot the name of it so I can not find it anymore on the Internet :(. But I will try to describe it with text. It is a solar powered toy truck. When there is sunlight it goes forward. However because it is chained to a pole so its trail is actually a spiral. It carries some amounts of sand in it and every some time a fixed amount of sand comes out. So when there is strong sunlight it goes fast and draw a thin line, and when it is cloudy it moves slowly and leaves heavy strokes. It is very a simple but interesting artwork.
The Natrue of Code(2012) Chapter 2 by Daniel Shiffman toggleRes(4)}>

1. physics 101: F = m*a. We use it to describe the physical world where we are now (well at least in most cases). So are we using it to simulate our world on a computer. It is, no doubt, a very useful pieces of knowledge for making games (although some game makers might say no). But for an artist, maybe there is a question needed to be asked first: why would I want to simulate what is happening in the world? (I mean this world is bad enough, we don't need another copy of it.) Why not create your own digital world, in which F = m ^ 2 * a * unicorn? And for me, I think that might be more interesting. (A very valuable realization after reading the introduction of physics: create your own physics)
The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art by Jason Bailey toggleRes(5)}>

1."Conway's Game of Life is more like half psychology and half math." This is very interesting. It points out that Conway's Game of Life is not about how life emerged from inorganic matter, but how we perceive the idea of "alive". Can the fact that only three simple rules are capable of generating the most complex behaviors indicates that our world, including ourselves, functions similarly? This is a very serious philosophical question. That makes me though about one difference between the very basic 1D cellular automata and Conway's Game of Life that might not be addressed before: Compared to the basic cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life is more demanding about the initial status. We don't think that 1D cellular automaton is "alive" maybe because no matter how it starts, it ends up similarly or even exactly the same. But in Conway's Game of Life, how we set the initial status changes the outcome a lot. So maybe, our perception of alive has something to do with these "valid choices".
2."For me, emergence is evidence of a decentralized alternative to the more prevalent, centralized creation myth that dictates a sole divine architect created the world from some kind of rational blueprint." As an individualist anarchist, I found this very inspiring. In a social aspect, emergence acknowledges that decentralized individuals can perform well when facing different challenges without a centralized "brain" to make decisions for them. It can be a base to construct a model of ideal anarchy states.
Generative Practice. The State Of The Art(2021) by Jeremy Levine toggleRes(6)}>

1. Complexity. It is very interesting that Mark Rothko's Untitled (Back and Grey) is considered one of the masterpieces in contemporary painting, but probably no one will purchase an image that contains 50% black pixels and 50% grey pixels generated by one line of code. Some might argue that if the image generated by a computer also has the vivid brush textures, it will also be a masterpiece. I guess to some degree that's correct, but then what is the point of using computers? I guess when we talk about complexity, we are actually talking about the characteristic of being ununiform and hard to understand (I mean, hard for the audience to understand the underlying system from just the visuals/sounds). Thus, the generated back and grey image is not interesting because it is easy to look through. However, coming back to Rothko's works, because we know his life history and his style transformations, we tend to have this idea of "There must be some profound reasons for him to do that", consciously or not. So, I guess when I, somehow, become a famous artist and have done lots of works involving complex systems, I can exhibit the back and grey image and make the argument that complexity is not necessary at all in generative art.
2. "Generative Art finds itself at an intersection between science and nature, often emulating organic processes but realizing them in completely inorganic ways." Because of Zuckerberg, the idea of metaverse becomes quite popular recently. While most of the generative artists are chasing organic or natural outputs, could we say that in a sense the artists are making a metaverse? It resembles the world, somehow, or at least in some aspect, but it is also essentially different and independent. But in another hand, why not generative artists reverse the process and try to bring something from the metaverse to the physical world? The Japanese artist and scholar Yoichi Ochiai proposed the idea of "Digital Nature", which means to transform the materials and the material-less. We are now often generating intangible things according to the physical world, is it possible for us to generate material from data and signals? How can we define or redefine the relationship between the material and the digital?
A Context for Complexism: Between Neoliberal Social Thought and Algorithmic Art (2018) by Ricky D. Crano toggleRes(7)}>

Complexity points out that simple and easy-to-understand rules can lead to huge structures, while neo-liberalists believe that in a free market, the decision made by the radical individuals according to the basic value rules can form and support the market itself. So yes indeed these two ideas are very similar, and one of my friends in the mathematics department is now devoting all his time trying to be rich in the stock market by researching this. I think the basic underlying thing in these two ideas is "self-organization". Systems with complexity are aesthetically interesting because many of the time they appear to be self-organized, and free markets can be free because of their ability to organize themselves so no external force like the government is needed. However, we do know that systems with complexity do not behave in organized ways all the time. There is, in most cases quite large, a chance that the system falls into chaos, or becomes deadly still. Neo-liberalists might hate this part. I am not that optimistic about complex systems being able to model societies like Galanter. This is probably because my friend hasn't become a billionaire for his research yet. But seriously, I think the difference between human societies and complex systems is that agents in complex systems always act according to some sort of rules, maybe sometimes plus some randomness, but generally, they are "rational", which means their behaviors can be predicted in one way or another. However, I really don't believe that every individual human being in society is, and all the time is, "rational". I guess for generative artists who want to work with social issues, one goal is to reveal this kind of "irrational" and how it contradicts the vision. That's probably also what the author wants. But I am not sure if complexism "achieves just the opposite", since the failures of the attempts actually show us the truth.
Should generative art be political? (2012) by Boris Magrini toggleRes(8)}>

It is often very confusing, at least for me, when discussing issues like should (any kind of)art be (scientific/social...) political. So, how to define "political"? Or how can we know that an artwork, especially a generative artwork, is political? If a work talks about political issues, for example, Georgie Roxby Smith's Fair Fight, do we consider it political? If so, lots of generative art can be considered as political, like Stranger Visions by Dewey-Hagborg. But if we consider a narrower definition, only those embedded political content should be counted as political, then very few works will remain. Ip Yuk Yiu's False Words probably is one of them. Despite the forms, Dewey-Hagborg's work and Ip's work are still different. The former, though widely percept as a political statement against surveillance and bio-power, can still be seen as avant-garde scientific research. But False Words, is more direct and aggressive. So, when they can all be called "political", what kind of "political" do we as generative artists want? Or what kind of work should we focus on?
Virtual Muse, Chapter 5 toggleRes(9)}>

"Verbal reality" and Internet era. The idea of human reality being (partially) linguistic is very interesting. Consider yourself a person who lives in London that has never been to Hong Kong and lived in the 1900s. All the realities you know about Hong Kong, for example, its tropical climate, come from newspaper stories. You probably don't even really understand what "tropical" means. That makes me think about the Twin Earth thought experiment by Putnam, which claims that meanings of words somehow also depend on "reality", or experience. So, the "true reality" and the "verbal reality" cross like vines, then create a sense of the world for us. The author also mentions online communication, of cause the Internet now is much more advanced and is no longer text-based. But images or video is just another form of "language". Thus we are still stuck with the question of this "online reality". And I think this is what we, as artists, can hack or address in our works.

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